Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#611

Post by merinowool » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #289

warent wrote: post #45

I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as they were asked. Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to…

Yeah it's a weird mix of helpful content moderated by an irritating hall monitor like community wielding power and making changes nobody wants. I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons. I just want the moderators t…

I think it is rare for a person to change its bullying behaviour. What SO should do is to review interactions and then remove all users demonstrating toxic behaviour and prevent them from registering again unless they can prove they successfully completed therapy.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#612

Post by your-nanny » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

6nf wrote: post #424

your-nanny wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that a minority needs to be identified as such to feel unwelcome in a community? That is the premise of your rebuttal

If someone is being treated badly on SO - but there's no way to know the race or gender of that person, how can you say the bad treatment is because of their race or gender?

I don't mean to be rude, but I think you are missing the point. Please read my comment again.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#613

Post by mistermann » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #592

warty wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using. You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not…

This removes a great deal of utility from the site. The majority of value in the site is not answering one individuals question at a time. Every single time I ask the search engine a programming question SO pops up as the first result. Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it…

> Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.

Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#614

Post by wool_gather » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

telltruth wrote: post #543

There is a time that arrives for many companies where they stop being from cool, fast, creative, whimsical to... well, just collection of business suits. So first consider the fact that this is written by Jay Hanlon, EVP of Culture and Experience. When you see titles like this for individuals working in full time position at about the highest level of executive staff, you know what I was talking about. To confirm my…

This, so much. Jay Hanlon is the single worst thing that has happened to Stack Overflow, hands down. His relentless focus on inclusion is all form and no function: making things seem nicer, without addressing the actual painpoints experienced by all users, new or veteran. Those painpoints engender frustration and lead to the hostility that comes from both sides. For all his insistence on the primacy of people's feedback, he completely ignores and dismisses the concerns of existing, engaged users.

Whatever gains have come from the the means he has chosen come at the very real cost of the expertise that makes the site useful.

Eight, even six, years ago, when you clicked that link from Google to Stack, you got your answer, first time. Now you're lucky if you can find it among the broken code masquerading as a task-oriented question and copy-pasted answers that reply.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#615

Post by mistermann » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #608

mulvya wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer ... what is the downside ...? Turnover/churn. If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. Moderation would need to keep up with silo-ing these Qs into the 'novice area' you propose. Experts would need to sift more to get to the intere…

> If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. This is really excusing bad UI/UX (like surfacing existing answers while a user is typing a question) and a bad ranking algorithm. There is no such thing as "being flooded" only bad search algorithms, and bad UX. Google is "flooded" with a result set spanning the enti…

I disagree. Excessive copies of the same question can dilute votes, which is one of their strongest signals for quality, as it should be.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#616

Post by lambda » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #606

lambda wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on im…

> there is no meta review There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.

OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going.

But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction.

That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#617

Post by scj » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

sosborn wrote: post #476

bad_user wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your kind of answer is precisely why I find SO useless. When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing. E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead. SO contributors should answer the freaking question firs…

The people that really need to know how to insert a 500mb string will actually explain why they need to do so (beyond the typical “it doesn’t work”). The ones that can’t explain why are almost always unaware of the actual problem they need to solve.

95% of the time I want to do something in a clearly sub-optimal way is because I'm required to use an unmodifiable code base that forces a path.

But sometimes explaining how the situation arises:

* Violates NDA/secrecy/licensing agreements.

* It can be complicated to explain the conditions that created the situation to people that aren't working with a custom/proprietary tech stack.

* Is irrelevant. If the operation needed to solve my problem can be concisely stated, why type a distraction?

I remember one post where someone said something like: "It'd be better if you tried this, but if you really need to do X..." followed by an explanation that solved my problem. It made my day.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#618

Post by pellucidar » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

makapuf wrote: post #190

icc97 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. > But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, They don't say it out in the open, they contact the SO admins directly or through surveys.

But how would you know about reactions to genre, skin color or other group if they weren't mentioned in the first place? And in that case why mention them at all on SO of all sites ? Or maybe it was about Perl coders? Be kind with them please.

I'm guessing the point here is that the named groups feel particularly unwelcome at SO; this can be the case without any opportunity for or evidence of discrimination. The blog post wasn't all that clear about how they got the data, but they seem to have data to that effect. It might mean that the expectations of the named groups are different from those of the average white male programmer, or it may only mean that everyone is put off by SO equally but SO is no longer willing to alienate everyone if it also means alienating the named groups.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#619

Post by PurpleBoxDragon » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

warty wrote: post #384

wheelie_boy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'. If you could only meet the needs…

There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that. Question: Ho…

My experience is always been like this:

Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over.

Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z.

Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that.

Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X, but if you have to use Y this is the best I've found.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#620

Post by PurpleBoxDragon » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #603

gaius wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome As a non-white I call shenanigans. My non-whiteness is very obvious in my SO profile pic and not once in 8 years of active use of the site has it ever come up, nor have I perceived being treated any differently. Also, no one ever asked me if I felt “unwelcome” nor is there a button to click for that, so I don’t know wher…

Else-net, there was a theory put out that if one feels marginalized already, then the perception of "Stack Overflow doesn't want my question, they down voted it because it lacks any code" is evidence of that marginalization even though its directed at everyone.

This seems likely. If you are mistreated for a given reason, you would likely attribute mistreatment elsewhere to having the same cause, and given that would be ones first impression of mistreatment, even with evidence that the mistreatment is for another more broader issue, people will likely contribute the mistreatment to the original reason they were mistreated in the first area. It is similar to making a bad first impression; it takes a lot more effort to correct a bad first impression than to maintain a good first impression.